As the use of electronic mail (“e-mail”) has become more and more pervasive, users have become inundated with an ever increasing volume of e-mail messages. In order to deal with the increased volume of e-mail messages, many users utilize their e-mail inbox as a task list. For instance, for many users, the fact that an e-mail message is present in their inbox, as opposed to another folder, indicates that some action remains to be taken with respect to the e-mail message. Other users mark e-mail messages as having been read or unread in order to indicate the status of the messages. Some other users even aggressively file e-mail messages into separate folders to keep track of e-mail messages that represent pending task items.
Although these methods for managing an e-mail inbox as a task list suffer from a number of drawbacks, users have not been previously provided with a meaningful alternative. For instance, previous e-mail application programs provided users the ability to associate a flag with an e-mail message. However, in order to flag an e-mail message, a user was required to perform the time consuming step of opening a dialog box and associating the flag with the message through the dialog box. Moreover, the flag status of an e-mail message may be set by the sender of an e-mail message. Accordingly, when messages flagged by other users are received and combined with other flagged messages, confusion is likely to result. Accordingly, the previous application programs for managing e-mail messages have not provided meaningful tools for managing and prioritizing lists of e-mail messages.
It is with respect to these considerations and other that the various embodiments of the present invention have been made.